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ChatGPT and food-delivery droids came to my campus at roughly the same time, in the 2022–23 academic year. My response—cranky, tweedy—was hopelessly on brand for a history professor. The chatbot and the droid appeared to be in league, robotic species on the vanguard of civilizational collapse.
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A vivid rumor began circulating in the United States in the middle of the 1850s. It was said that Robert Toombs, the ardently pro-slavery Georgia senator, was going to come to Boston and “call the roll of his slaves at the foot of Bunker Hill.
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In 1915, former President Theodore Roosevelt criss-crossed the country as a champion of what he called “Americanism.” The concept was becoming commonplace in American discourse, marking a stand against what he referred to as “hyphenated Americanism.
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Exactly 39 years after Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic” was first published in The Atlantic, Mark Twain scratched out a new version. “Battle Hymn,” which Twain considered “beautiful and sublime,” was in need of revision.
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Because every day is Black Friday at Costco, I choose to go on Saturday. I like to get there early. I always park in the same spot (right next to the cart return), and wait with the other die-hards. It has the thrill of a stakeout, absent any crime or danger.
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After his death, James Garfield got the full Horatio Alger treatment. As well he should have. Garfield, who died in September 1881 from an assassin’s bullet and his own doctors’ staggeringly inept care, really did rise, as Alger’s book phrased it, From Canal Boy to President.
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The Atlantic launched its website in November 1995, 138 years after it first went into print. The magazine began in response to one information revolution; the website appeared at the dawn of another. Now, 30 years on from the launch, you can buy a copy of the first printed edition of the magazine on eBay, but you can’t find much of the original website.
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Late in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, one character wonders to another “whether the world is anchored anywhere.” It was a fair question in November 1851, when Moby-Dick was published; it was still an open one in November 1857, when the first issue of The Atlantic Monthly came out. American life felt unmoored.
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Donald Trump and Ronald Reagan briefly crossed paths last week. The Canadian province of Ontario arranged the encounter.
Late on August 24, 1814, a troop of about 150 British sailors and marines arrived at the White House. They did not come as honored guests, though they would treat themselves as such. James and Dolley Madison, the official residents, had fled earlier amid preparations for an event in the formal dining room. The table was already set, the food prepared, and the British helped themselves to a sumptuous feast, toasting the future King George IV and commenting on the fine Madeira.
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Imagine this: A tech guy has revolutionized the world with an innovation that unleashes unimaginable productivity, and brought himself unimaginable wealth. An imperial president, empowered by the Supreme Court to wield unchecked authority, seeks a third term in office, or else to pass the reins on to his son.
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In 1934, Edwin Embree made an informal list of “the dozen greatest universities in America.” As he related in The Atlantic the following year, “A storm at once broke over my temerarious head.” An unnamed politician responded with curses and threats over the exclusion of his state’s university on the list.
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Early in the Civil War, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. announced in The Atlantic that the necessities of life had been reduced to two things: bread and the newspaper. Trying to keep up with what Holmes called the “excitements of the time,” civilians lived their days newspaper to newspaper, hanging on the latest reports. Reading anything else felt beside the point.